


Needle & Sword

by Apricot



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-11 21:30:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9031103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apricot/pseuds/Apricot
Summary: The thing about growing up with four brothers was that one tended to get very good at bandaging wounds.Immortality had not changed that.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercyBuckets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercyBuckets/gifts).



> Thanks Reishiin for doing some lovely beta-ing, right under the wire. :)

_1694_

_Little Woodham, England_

The thing about growing up with four brothers was that one tended to get very good at bandaging wounds.

Immortality had not changed that.

“Hold still—“ she hissed, pursing her lips. It was amazing, the roles they still clung to. She was as much a killer as the rest of them and yet somehow _she’d_ been designated nursemaid whenever her brothers came down with more than a scratch.

If she had thought about her brothers each objectively, she would have placed her money on Niklaus being the worst when it came to injuries and doctoring. It wasn’t. Nick was terrible, to be sure, and he often raged under any ministrations, but Rebekah got the feeling he rather liked the attention. God knew when she didn't bother, he was even worse.

She would have preferred Nick's histrionics right now. She'd barely managed to get Elijah sitting down.

“You are so _stupid_ , do you know that?” she said, scowling as she concentrated on threading a needle. Six hundred years, and she still couldn’t get it on the first try.

“This is unnecessary." Elijah's tone was solid, placid, the kind that made you feel perfectly unreasonable even though _he_ was the one being the idiot. He’d perfected it over the last century. It drove her and Niklaus insane.

Her older brother looked remarkably calm despite the fact that his face and chest were soaked with blood. “We know that I’m going to heal without a scar or a scratch.”

“Yes, but who’s going to heal the carpets?” Rebekah replied tartly. “You’re bleeding on everything.”

Elijah frowned at her. He seemed to manage pain better than Klaus or Kol did, but she could tell by the fine tremble of her brother’s hands that he had to be feeling this. One got more tolerant as time went on, but that didn’t mean the pain lessened.

“I can do this myself.”

She got the needle threaded and stuck it a few inches from the shallowest end of the cut above his forehead in response. He didn’t so much as flinch, but his lips did tighten.

“Go ahead, glare," she said. "You're going to look permanently surprised if I stitch it like that."

An exaggeration. It would heal fine. She probably didn't even need to do this-- the bleeding looked like it was slowing, for all the blood on his face-- but they’d learned head wounds tended to bleed long and heavy. Plus, she didn't like the sight of blood covering her brothers when it involved some injury. She'd managed to become inured to many things, but not that.

Elijah’s hands were occupied, holding the remnants of his shirt to the three parallel holes that gouged his chest. The village idiots had missed his heart—no that it would have mattered so long as they hadn’t been holding white oak—but the way his breath was hitching slightly told her they’d probably not missed Elijah’s lung.

 _The villagers._ She was glad they were all dead. She was glad they’d all died _bloody._

“You shouldn’t have done anything,” Rebekah said, discarding the needle. The wound was bleeding, but she could see it was slowing now. The skin was beginning to knit itself together. Thankfully, she and her siblings seemed to heal faster every century. Small favors.

She sighed, and picked up the basin of warm water she'd put to the side, along with a clean cloth. She dipped the cloth into it and wrung it out. “Nick had taken care of everything already.”

“Yes, I’m quite the admirer of how _Niklaus_ takes _care_ of things,” Elijah murmured. “Turning your accuser’s husband and letting him drain her—it certainly  _deescalated_ the situation, didn’t it?”

It had gotten rid of the immediate problem. Their neighbor, a nosy, irritating woman, had gotten a bit too interested in Rebekah and the fact that they'd nearly been here eight years and Rebekah hadn't aged a day. With the boys, it didn't matter-- she rarely saw them. But Rebekah....well, she'd gone and told the villagers that they were harboring a witch, and since this region was a bit manic about that sort of thing, they'd been nervous. Niklaus had done the most expedient thing: he'd turned the woman's husband and allowed him to drain her dry.

Cruel, but expedient. Unfortunately, the rest of the town hadn't been deterred. Niklaus and Kol had been out when they’d come to the small house in town that she'd been living in and tried to set it on fire. Imbeciles.

Elijah and Rebekah had both been home. The corner of the house hadn't even caught light before she and her brother had slaughtered them all. It had been very cathartic, but for one particularly determined man who had managed to skewer her brother through the chest with a pitchfork.

Rebekah had torn his head off from his body a second later and let it skid across the floor.

Now the villagers' bodies were piled up in the hall and they were going to have to deal with _that_ later. She wasn’t looking forward to it.

“Maybe we just burn this place down with the bodies inside,” she suggested brightly, and dabbed away some of the blood on Elijah’s brow, trying to clear his eyes. “This place is a bore, anyway. Let’s go back to Paris.”

“It hasn’t been long enough. You know that.” Elijah closed his eyes as she made a pass over his face. The wound trickled some fresh blood, but less now.

“Spain, then.”

He managed a faint smile that only looked a little like a grimace.

She cleaned the blood from his strong features, glancing at the tight lines around his eyes and his mouth. He seemed to be breathing easier now. That was good.

"Spain would be lovely," she said. "Kol's always complaining this place is too cold in comparison to Haiti, or wherever he last was with his witch-friends. We've never been."

They would need to leave, anyway. Even if there was no one suspicious left alive anymore, there was always the chance that this act could bring Father down on them. Elijah seemed to be thinking along the same lines, because his chin tipped into a half nod.

She wiped away another streak of blood, brooding.

“Thank you, Elijah,” she finally said, after a moment.

That made his eyes open. He arched a brow, and then gave her another smile that seemed more real. “It makes you appreciate the irony, doesn’t it?”

“What?” she said. “Being accused of witchcraft?”

He nodded. “Considering…what we were. What we could have been.”

“What we would have been is dead,” she said, a little more severely than she intended. She sighed, and pushed at him a little to force him to sit, if not _lie,_ back. Elijah always seemed to hold himself as straight as an arrow, even in their company. Niklaus liked to joke that it was the stick up his ass.

It had made her laugh at the time. Now she found it made her a little sad.

“We would have been dead going on more than 600 years,” she said. “We’d be dust in the ground. Our names would be forgotten.”

“So you prefer this?”

Her brothers, especially Niklaus, had that uncanny ability to see through her. It was irritating.

She chose not to answer, and wrung out the cloth before she began to clean away the dried blood on his throat. His shirt was hanging in tatters, most of it balled-up in front of him, and she had to edge away the strips of fabric that had dried to the wound.

“Do you think we would have been happier?” 

“Yes,” she said, without thinking, and felt stung by her own answer. She pursed her lips and sat back a little. “Move your hands. I want to see.”

Elijah sighed, but did as he was told. He pulled back the balled up, blood-soaked remnants of his shirt and let them drop.

She wrung out the cloth in the warm water again. “Do you remember that time Finn cut your shoulder? Practicing with the sword? You were practicing, in front of Father.”

It was a memory from long, long ago, more an impression of feeling or sounds than anything clear. Elijah and Finn, more light-hearted than they’d ever be again, tentative and unsure and young, so young. Physically, they hadn’t changed, but it felt like they were barely children in comparison to now.

“I seem to remember that was the first time you came at me with a needle and thread.”

“It was more interesting than trying to work on embroidery or dresses.”

“I still have that scar.”

“Well, it was my first time—“ Rebekah protested.

“I think we all knew you would have rather been wielding the sword than doing the mending, either way,” Elijah said, and the note in his voice was fond. She chanced a glance up.

“Yes, well, it’s more interesting putting holes into people than fixing them.” The blood had slowed here too. She appraised it coolly before carefully scrubbing away the rest of the blood from the three parallel holes in his chest.

Elijah followed her ministrations. “Then you did get what you wanted. Mostly.”

Rebekah hesitated a moment, and then looked up at him. For once, his serious face had softened, and he was smiling. Not much, but she could see it around the lines of his eyes and his mouth this time. She couldn’t help but smirk a little in return.

“I got my brothers,” she pointed out. “Always and forever. That’s what’s important.”

His hand slid over hers. “Always and forever.”


End file.
